Google have made an announcement today about site speed and how it effects search ranking algorithms. Check out the Webmaster Central blog This is what they have to say -> "You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."
Nice information from Google. have to optimize the images, and other stuff to make the site respond more faster then ever,.
That was on Friday, April 09, 5 days ago, NOT today. There are at least 5 threads on DP forums about it already. The full Google article is at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html